Oh yeah…

One pro-marijuana group is calling on the government to allow marijuana in smoking lounges at airports across the country.

Yes, they are asking the federal government–OUR federal government–to allow pot smoking in airports. Uh huh.

The group says in a press release that the idea will address the growing number of in-flight problems involving drunk and disorderly passengers. Members claim marijuana is a better alternative to alcohol to help more fliers relax and deal with the anxiety of air travel.

Yes, in spite of the US government’s unconstitutional raids on legal, state-sanctioned medical marijuana dispensaries in California and other places, these dimwitted cheeba monkeys are asking the federal government to suddenly allow drug trafficking via Southwest Airlines.

Look, it isn’t that I don’t agree with them in principle, but this stunt doesn’t pass the laugh test. (Although I’m sure that in the clouded haze of their office, they thought it was the most brilliant idea ever duuude…well, until someone thought about ordering pizza.)

Stick to the basics, Beavis: lobby for local and/or state legislation–when the feds come in, challenge them in court. Or just do like everybody else does…smoke on the way to the airport.

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Filed under: Behind Every Law..., The Homeland, Daily Rant

From Down Under:

THE head of one of the nation’s elite private schools has questioned whether English should be compulsory for the senior years, saying the courses being taught are beyond the intellectual ability of most students.

Elite? Given their stated lack of ability to comprehend their (arguably) native language, perhaps they aren’t sure what “elite” means.

If the elite private school kids can’t understand English, their public school counterparts are probably just above helmet-wearing shit and drool factories.

But they’re all probably still better than D.C. schools.

Speaking of our nation’s worst school system, D.C. Congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton is trying to take away the vouchers that actually let D.C. kids escape the festering pit that is District public education.

For those of you unfamiliar with the would-be Congresswoman from D.C., here are a couple clips from her first appearance with Stephen Colbert on the Colbert Report:

This is the woman deciding the fate of D.C.’s kids. They’re screwed.

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Filed under: Daily Rant

I don’t know if some slack-assed intern is to blame or if the producers at FOXNews are really as dumb as they seem to be, but this is just incomprehensibly stupid:

Yes, when Hillary suggested a Lincoln-Douglas style debate with Barack Obama, some bumbling imbecile at FOXNews apparently thought Abraham Lincoln debated Frederick Douglass.

I don’t read Wonkette (nothing against them, I just don’t) , so tip to Yglesias.

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Filed under: Pop! Goes the Culture, Daily Rant

So, our friend is out of jail and has been assigned a court date. Needless to say, everyone involved is of varying degrees of pissed off.

Megan, Radley, Julian, and Jason all have good takes on what went down — I suggest checking out their posts for some insight–and a little laughter too.

Photographs, video and eyewitnesses aplenty, this should be a slam dunk against the government — but that does not mean that this is all ok. An arrest is still an arrest and our friend faces consequences for doing absolutely nothing wrong. She was polite, cooperative and stone-cold sober. Her crime, in addition to “bopping” (as overheard spoken by one of the arresting officers), was apparently inquiring as to what exactly she was doing wrong. For that, she was thrown up against a pillar in front of about 20 friends and summarily arrested — for quietly celebrating TJ’s birthday.

It should be noted that if she was “MMM-bopping,” the officers may have had a stronger case. But that is neither here nor there.

N.B.:

After calming down a bit, I realized that the original version of this post may have, albeit unintentionally, painted the entire police force with a single stroke. The simple fact of the matter is that this was a wrongful arrest by a single police officer or group of officers. This should not even reflect the entire Park Police or even all those on duty last evening/this morning.

That said, I have no love for that particular officer and his over-the-top actions.

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Filed under: Behind Every Law..., Freedom on Film, Profiles in Governance, Daily Rant

Ok. I’m going to have to turn in my libertarian card for this one:

An Australian man and his adult daughter went public about their incestuous relationship after having a baby together, as it emerged that a previous child of the couple died a few days after birth.

John Deaves, 61, and his daughter Jenny, 39, have a 9-month-old daughter but have been banned from having sex after a court convicted the pair on two counts of incest.

“The couple are being monitored by the relevant authorities,” a South Australia state police spokesman told Reuters today.

The case provoked international media attention when the couple appeared on Australia’s 60 Minutes programme to explain their relationship, which began when the two were re-united eight years ago.

I might be able to say that as consenting adults, however depraved, they should be allowed to do as they wish. But kids?????

[T]he Australian Associated Press said on Monday that court documents showed they had another child in 2001 who died from congenital heart problems.

Congenital heart problems? Really? They’re lucky they didn’t have flipper babies!!!

Sick. Fuck.

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Filed under: Politics is Personal, Sexxx, Daily Rant

Yes. It’s finally arrived! I now have 4000 unread messages in my Yahoo! inbox!

Oh, you thought I was going to write at length about the 4000th American fatal casualty in Iraq?

No.

Frankly, I’m disgusted that because we hit a round number that somehow the war is fundamentally more tragic, save for the families and loved ones of those just lost, than it was two days ago.

Get real.

End the fucking war.

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Filed under: Politics is Personal, Daily Rant

I write for F&S because I need an outlet for my more outlandish and less-serious thoughts — and I was terribly flattered that Aynnie invited me to write here. I have my own blog to which I affix my given name to keep my name in the public sphere — even if no one regularly reads it — and to keep my writing sharp (-ish). I don’t fear legal retribution for anything I write here not because I am anonymous, but because I think most rational people can see the absurdity of the government and individual actions I write about. I’m sure I piss some people off, but such is the beauty of the medium.

That said, perhaps I should be more concerned:

It’s a mystery that has gripped Whitewater city government since July: Who is John Adams, the anonymous blogger at www.freewhitewater.com?

…

He is critical of the School District and other local officials, calling a former municipal judge who was convicted of lewd behavior last year a “vulgar laughingstock.”

But much of his criticism is reserved for Whitewater’s police chief, James Coan, whom the closeted critic accuses of misusing his position.

Case in point: Coan’s use of city employees to try to unmask Adams — exposed in a series of posts on his blog earlier this month — that is part Keystone Cops and part challenge to Adams’ constitutional rights.

According to Whitewater Police Department e-mails obtained by Adams under the state’s open records law, Coan involved at least two detectives, the city’s director of public works, its information technology officer and the city clerk — all working on city time and using taxpayer-funded resources — to find the identity of a man described as a “suspect” but who had not committed a crime.

Granted, working inside the Beltway provides me certain protections because it is a major city — albeit a rather shitty one — that thrives on criticism of government and its policies. So many of us here would be entirely out of work if the government stuck to its functions and only did what it was meant to do.

Nevertheless, it troubles me that what I do, namely what you’re reading, is being targeted by law enforcement in our country without even the common decency to pass a law outlawing anony-blogging. But really?:

In Whitewater, the effort to discover Adams’ identity included examining his e-mails and Web site registration, running a license plate check on a man suspected of being Adams (he wasn’t), and suggesting city officials conduct surveillance at the dedication of a restored historic landmark on the chance he might be there.

“I think it is someone we want to keep an eye on…,” Whitewater Police Detective Tina Winger wrote in an e-mail to Coan. “Seems like an anti-government radical to me.”

The investigation culminated in a Jan. 4 visit from Coan and Whitewater Police Lt. Tim Gray to the home of Scott, whom Coan said afterward he was “99.9 percent convinced” was the blogger.

In fact, said Adams, who revealed his identity to the Wisconsin State Journal on condition of anonymity, the chief was “100 percent wrong.”

Whitewater City Manager Kevin Brunner said he sees nothing wrong with city employees’ attempts to expose Adams. He said the efforts took very little time and were aimed at seeking a dialogue with the blogger to address his complaints about the city.

“I think it was a very legitimate use of their time,” Brunner said. “I think the impetus was to try to engage in some civil discourse with that person.

Regular readers know that I’m not one to be generous with the benefit of the doubt for public — and especially police — officials. But I don’t know what backwatered moron could possibly buy the “efforts took very little time and were aimed at seeking a dialogue with the blogger to address his complaints about the city” bullshit.

Honestly, when is the last time you called a man with a gun something to the effect of “bumbling fucktard” and expected his reaction — with his similarly armed friends with surveillance capabilities — to include “seeking a dialogue”?

More power to “John Adams” and his libertarian crusade in Wisconsin.

Much love to Fark.

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Filed under: Behind Every Law..., Profiles in Governance, Daily Rant

In what can best be described as “desperation” in the face of the D.C. v. Heller case, the D.C. Police plan to go door-to-door, asking for permission to search residents’ homes for illegal guns and drugs.

D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) and Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier announced several new initiatives today aimed at combating gun crimes, including one encouraging residents to submit to voluntary searches of their homes in exchange for amnesty if the residents have illegal guns or drugs.

Right. “Submit” to “voluntary” searches for things that shouldn’t be illegal in the first place.

There won’t be any pressure, I’m sure. The police will never get suspicious if a nervous resident turns down them down. The residents will just assume that the cops will just forget — they won’t record who assents and who doesn’t. And we all know, if there is one group of people who trust the police to protect them, it’s the people in the poor, urban neighborhoods.

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Filed under: Behind Every Law..., Daily Rant

This is why minors shouldn’t vote:

This community on the edge of Los Angeles has become a cuss-free zone.
…

Not that police will slap cuffs on you and haul your sorry, er, butt off to jail in light of the proclamation passed Wednesday by the City Council. But you could be shamed into better behavior by the unsettling glares of residents who take their reputation for civility seriously.

“That’s one of the purposes of this,” Mayor Michael Cacciotti said of his city’s proclamation designating the first week of March as No Cussing Week. “It provides us a reminder to be more civil, to elevate the level of discourse.”

The proclamation will be in effect until Friday, and then the first week of every March hereafter.

…

But what’s different about the latest push to stop saying in public the words that Jane Fonda and Diane Keaton recently discovered we still can’t say on television is that it was proposed by a 14-year-old boy.

“My mom and dad always taught me good morals, good values, and not cussing was one of them,” said McKay Hatch, the founder of South Pasadena High School’s No Cussing Club, during a recent break between study hall and tennis practice.

1. Who names their kid “McKay”? Did they want him to get beat up? (I would know this. I’m a boy named “Sue,” for Christ’s sake.)

2. The South Pasadena City Council has proven its own uselessness by passing a law of no consequence, that flies in the face of the 1st Amendment, inspired by a 14-year-old who is put-off by swearing. Fuck them and him.

3. The word is “curse,” goddamn it. “Cuss” is a derivative, colloquial form of the word “curse” that is more offensive to my ears than “fuck,” “shit,” or “douchebag” could ever be.

4. You can tell someone, “proceed to fellate yourself whilst being sodomized with a jagged-edge of a broken coke bottle by your mother who wears comfortable shoes” without using any foul language. If you’re going to be so asinine to attempt to “elevate the level of discourse,” by restricting speech, at least have the common sense to ban ideas, not just words.

More on the absurdity of the anti-swearing assholes here:

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Filed under: Behind Every Law..., Profiles in Governance, Daily Rant

As if the Federal Election Commission doesn’t already have plenty of reasons to cease to exist, an article in the March issue of Harper’s (subscription req.) exposes a glaring loophole in the ethics rules passed by Congress last year (Via Washington Post) :

Fortunately for the fate of the republic, that ethics bill, like so many previous ethics bills, left a loophole big enough to drive an armored car through. Sure, a lobbyist can no longer buy your congressman a $41 porterhouse steak at the Capital Grille, but the lobbyist can still donate $2,300 to the congressman’s reelection campaign and then they can both chow down, safe in the knowledge that the campaign can pick up the tab.

…

“As the ‘campaign’ has lost all temporal and spatial boundaries, and the FEC has largely turned a blind eye,” [Harper’s contributor Ken]Silverstein writes, “misuse of donor money has become positively shameless.”

How shameless? “Between 2005 and late 2007,” Silverstein writes, “at just ten of Washington’s priciest restaurants, House members collectively spent $5.4 million of their campaign money.”

Silverstein’s story is filled with wonderfully lurid statistics on how much campaign money pols spend filling their pie holes. Here’s one stat about the face-stuffing at just one venue, the National Democratic Club on Capitol Hill: “During the first nine months of 2007, congressional Democrats and party committees used political contributions to pay for $426,431 worth of food and drink at the club.”

As a libertarian taxpayer who has never contributed a cent (directly*) to a reelection campaign, I suppose that I should be thankful that this money is not coming from the federal coffers. That said, this is yet another example of how the contribution laws inhibit the ability of average Americans to give their two cents to the system, while allowing deep-pocketed lobbyists to circumvent the standards (that they presumably had a hand in writing) and get influence at their leisure.

The fact of the matter is, FEC rules are feckless at their best — and egregious violations of Free Speech at their worst.

*Full disclosure: I gave money to a lobby group to protect the privilege of online gambling. We all know how well that turned out.

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Filed under: Profiles in Governance, Daily Rant